HD DVD crack cracks Digg

What makes this particular story interesting, though, is the way Digg reacted to the code being posted to their site and how quickly and widely has the code spread all over the web. Digg has at first complied with the cease and desist letter by MPAA and started removing posts with the offending code and banning users that posted it. What forced a complete turn around in digg's attitude was the pressure of its own userbase which kept posting about the issue on and on. Digg couldn't just delete all stories that have been been submitted so they buckled, while being full aware that they're putting themselves in the immediate legal risk.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. A lawsuit or two is not hard to imagine at this point, but on a more fundamental level it will do nothing to secure DRM from being cracked and circumvented, be that legal or not. P2PNet has a nice rundown on this story, so feel free to read more.

Update: BadMouth.net has divided the numbers of the code into hex codes which form five colors. These colors are now part of a new free speech flag.

Michael Ayers of the AACS sounds quite mad. It's interesting what he says here: "This is the first round and will not be the last."

The first round you totally and utterly lost perhaps? Who are they gonna sue now, those hundreds of thousands of websites? Google? Maybe digg, but like that will stop anything.

Even before we're entering the age of "1984" people online are showing that they wont put up to their people control techniques, be that disobedience legal or not. When it's wrong it's wrong. Law doesn't make it right, and people WILL break the law if they feel it's wrong.

So MPAA and the company can start putting some people in jail or whatever, but NONE of that will help their "cause". It will only further fuel the anti-DRM cause. Whatever they do, they lose. And let's make darn sure of that!

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What DRM is all about, and has always been, is selling the same stuff over and over to the consumer. The music industry still remembers how it made a huge bundle by selling everyone the CDs for the *same albums* that these people already owned as vinyls. And for a higher price to boot. So they would like to do that again, and again, with music and with movies, whenever the dominant format changes. And they would like the dominant format to change often, too (hence the successive pushing of Minidisc, SACD, DVD-Audio, etc, which all failed to attract the masses because the CD was not perfect, but quite good enough).

The fact is, once the content is on your computer, in a reasonably open format, you never need to buy it again. You just keep backups, and copy it over whenever you upgrade your computer. That's what the industry is scared of, and is trying as hard as it can to avoid. Not the fact that you might give a copy to your friend (who might well become a great fan and buy some more himself).

So we can all forget about the rhetoric of "the content creators must be paid somehow". They will be paid. Big media will not die. It might just, hopefully, not get its way to fleece us over and over for the same old stuff, and instead be forced to create new content that people are interested in.
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